New Fling – VMware Cloud Foundation (VCF) Configuration File Generator

Its been some time since I wrote an article on VMware Cloud Foundation. However, I recently caught up with my good pal Gary Blake who informed me about a significant new development in the VCF space. This is the release of a new fling called the VMware Cloud Foundation Configuration File Generator. This new fling will enable us to replace the Deployment Parameter Workbook with a containerized web application. This new application has the ability to validate all of the configuration inputs before generating the JSON file. This file is then used by the Cloud Builder appliance to bring up…

VMware Explore 2022: What’s new in vSphere 8 & vSAN 8

VMware Explore 2022 kicked off this week. There are of course many announcements taking place across the whole suite of VMware products. In this post, I will focus primarily on the announcements related to the products that I work with on a regular basis. Those products are vSphere 8, vSphere Tanzu Standard (vSphere with Tanzu), and vSAN 8. vSphere 8 In the vSphere 8 space, the most significant announcement in my opinion is the fact that we are delivering on Project Monterey. We got our first technical preview of Project Monterey back in 2020 by the VMware CTO, Kit Colbert.…

Multi-Factor/External Authentication on VMware Cloud Foundation

I recently had a question about multi-factor authentication within VCF, VMware Cloud Foundation. I was able to find out the answer after sending the query to a few folks on the VCF team. It transpires that VMware have recently delivered MFA (Duo support) and external Authn/AuthZ (Oasis, SAML, OKtA, AzureAD, PING) via a joint partner solution with Entrust. Support for VMware Cloud Foundation (VCF) and SDDC Manager appears in HyTrust CloudControl, Version 6.4. Per the CloudControl Administration Guide, when SDDC manager is added to CloudControl, the inventory of the vSphere and NSX-T resources can be viewed. Access control policies can…

vSphere with Tanzu backup/restore with Velero vSphere Operator

Last week, I posted about the vSAN Data Persistence platform (DPp), a feature that is now available with VMware Cloud Foundation (VCF) 4.2. In that article, I went through the setup of the Minio Operator in vSphere with Tanzu, and then we created a Minio Tenant with its own S3 Object Store. In other words, we were able to assign an on-premises S3 Object Store to a vSphere with Tanzu namespace in just a few clicks, which was pretty cool. Now, one of the other Supervisor services that is available with VCF 4.2 is the Velero vSphere Operator. Many of…

A first look at DPp (Data Persistence platform) and MinIO

Today I want to take a closer look at the new vSAN Data Persistence platform (DPp). I mentioned that this was a key reason for updating my VMware Cloud Foundation environment to version 4.2, which officially released last week. One of the services included in DPp is the MinIO S3 compatible object store. Although I have written about MinIO a number of time on this site, the fact that it is now incorporated as a service in the new DPp makes it even easier to deploy than ever before. In this post, we will look at the steps involved in…

VCF 4.1.0.1 Update to VCF 4.2 – Step by Step

VMware recently announced the release of VMware Cloud Foundation (VCF) version 4.2. I was particular interested in this release as it allows me to try out the new vSAN Data Persistence platform (DPp). My good pal Myles has an excellent introduction to DPp here  and I plan to create a number of posts on it going forward. My VCF 4.1.0.1 environment is what we call a Consolidated Architecture , meaning that both the management domain and workload domain run on the same infrastructure. The primary application that I run in this environment is VCF with Tanzu (vSphere with Tanzu on…

VMware Cloud Foundation (VCF) 4.1 – What’s new?

To coincide with a new release of vSphere 7.0U1 and vSAN 7.0U1, there is also a new release of VMware Cloud Foundation releasing. This is VCF version 4.1. In this release, as well as a bunch of updates to the versions of the various VMware products that make up the VCF bill of materials, there are also some nice new enhancements. In this post, I’ll highlight the big features that I know a number of customers are interested in. Support for vVols as a Principal Storage for Workload Domains Virtual Volumes (vVols) is gaining more and more traction among VMware…